| 執筆者 | 森 知也（ファカルティフェロー）／小川 実起（京都大学） |
|---|---|
| 発行日/NO. | 2025年2月 25-P-006 |
| 研究プロジェクト | 経済集積理論に基づく地域経済の定量分析手法の開発 |
| ダウンロード/関連リンク |
概要
世界は、急速な少子・高齢化と人口減少に直面している。一方で、物流の自動化や仮想現実に関する技術進歩に伴い距離摩擦が減少を続けていくだろう。距離摩擦の減少を伴う人口減少は、地方都市の急速な縮小と消滅を促し、今後、人口は今までにも増して大都市に集中する。各国は、国を維持するためにどの都市を維持すべきか、難しい選択を迫られている。本論は、世界の中でも人口減少の最前線にある日本に注目し、都市の人口と産業構成の明確な関係に基づいて、生活必需業種の維持可能性を基に都市の持続性を判定する体系的な方法を提案する。
概要（英語）
The world is undeniably facing trends of aging, declining birth rates and shrinking populations. As a result, rural economies are shrinking rapidly while large cities are absorbing their populations. Each country must make difficult decisions about which cities to preserve in order to sustain the country as a whole. Japan is at the forefront of rapid economic contraction, and we propose a systematic method for assessing the sustainability of cities as living communities. This method is based on the hierarchy property that holds between a larger and smaller city in the composition of tertiary industries. This property allows us to identify the threshold population size of a city for a given set of industries to be able to operate in the city. In particular, by defining the sets of essential industries for modern life, one can identify the population size of a sustainable city. Combined with a separately conducted future projection of individual city sizes, this represents a guideline for a strategic reduction of the country's economic geography by identifying the future spatial distribution of focal cities. This will allow for the reorganization of functional regions around focal cities to ensure that the country can adapt to its declining population.
